Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world’s leading Marxist
intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of Vladimir
Lenin. The volume’s editors explain that it was Lenin who made Karl
Marx’s thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the confines
of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus on Lenin
is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be the only
game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been settled
on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has become
easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in the mode
of production. Lenin retooled Marx’s thought for specific historical
conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention of the
revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be Leninist
in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance of the
consequences that follow from action.

These essays, some of which
are appearing in English for the first time, bring Lenin face-to-face
with the problems of today, including war, imperialism, the imperative
to build an intelligentsia of wage earners, the need to embrace the
achievements of bourgeois society and modernity, and the widespread
failure of social democracy. Lenin Reloaded demonstrates that truth and
partisanship are not mutually exclusive as is often suggested. Quite the
opposite—in the present, truth can be articulated only from a
thoroughly partisan position.